


P.B.A. (Public Benefit Assassin)

by Used_To_Have_A_Sleep_Schedule



Category: Original Work
Genre: Environmentalism, Experimental Style, F/F, F/M, Funny, M/M, Multi, Post-Apocalypse, Technology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:26:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24088078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Used_To_Have_A_Sleep_Schedule/pseuds/Used_To_Have_A_Sleep_Schedule
Summary: Vaskya (AKA Vaska) Is just someone trying to do their job after the world has stumbled through an apocalypse. Vaskya has been called (Or at least they claim to have been) by God Herself  to find and kill all of the people responsible for the end of the world. Along the way they collect new body modifications, tattoos, and relationships. Although they remember their first kill going quite smoothly, Vaska has no idea what is in store for them as their list grows shorter.





	1. Genesis

**Author's Note:**

> Vaska and Vaskya are interchangeable in Russian. (Васка, Васкя) and I will use them both just to refer to the one character. Pronouns: They, Them, Theirs.

**1** We all like to believe we all have one shared desire to be alive. **2** One Idea that, yeah although everything is kinda fucked right now, the corporations and politicians are bound by some “good”, some “right”, to prevent us all from descending into shit oblivion for some fancy colored linen, some “one-up” over their dead parents—always their fathers—some name signed on their wall or piece of paper telling people what to do, some group of people that swoop in the final hour, and now that I’ve drawn your attention to it you think that idea is dumb naïve and will make some self-serving google searches or quick mental justifications, before forgetting how stupid and naïve it is and settle back into believing it.  
 **3** “Humans Are ___” statements are idiotic. **4** They’re shortsighted and generalizing. **5** Every time someone makes a “Humans Are___” statement on Instagram I want to take my leg off and shove it down their throat.

**6** That being said, Humans Are Lazy. **7** Yeah yeah, I know I lied, but what are you gunna do about it? **8** Yeah that’s right. **9** Nothing. **10** I’d wager that since you’re even reading this you’re most likely cross-eyed and nearsighted, poor hygiene, lover of none besides cheese, fuckin’ nerd. **11** So the threat I’m feeling from you right now is the same if I was being charged by several angry earthworms. **12** Bookworms.  
 **13** I say this not for any reason besides the fact that I am not. **14** God Herself has told me my task, and unlike the rest of humanity, I will not pretend to be deaf. **15** If you are reading this I may not be dead. **16** I may be in a coma, I may be someone’s slave, buried alive, I may be brain dead, I may be stuck, I may have both of my of legs crushed like when the bones stick through your skin and shins, I may have my eyes pulled out and pushed out into the desert, I may have my hair ripped out and be slowly bleeding from a million pinprick holes, I may have my toes sawn off so It’s really hard to walk, I may be chained to a rock but not with any safety escape locks in the cuffs, I may have my hands tied above me and have to cut them off to escape, I may I may, I may.  
 **17** But, what I mayn’t is tell all of this to you if one of those things happened. **18** So

* * *

Vaskya frowned and put down their phone. They couldn’t figure out what should come next. Recount my first kill? First kill. Second kill? First kill. Ten commandments? Mine should be 11, improve on the base model. But God said that She didn’t think that model was applicable anymore. The guy God gave the Big Ten to was alive like a billion million years ago. No, I don’t—excuse me—doesn't want no 11 commandments. Commands are too strong, too language of the imperialists-y. Not that there’s anything to imperialize. Imperialize? Impere? Vaska shook their head. Regardless. Their phone beeped. Oh shit I gotta get into a charging zone. They took off their faux leather jacket and threw on their headphones and goggles—Vaskya had been recreating the first scene from their favorite movie, Mad Max: Fury Road and had lost track of time. After packing away the wig, blow-up car, and very real double-barreled sawed-off shotgun, Vaska hopped onto their boogieboard and let gravity Wisk them downhill. Downdune? Downhill.  
Vaska cut across the slopes of the dune, rocking back and forth to leave serpentine shapes in the sand for fun. They bent to a crouch and hopped, with whatever the sand-surfing equivalent of an ollie is. They landed rough, but that’s alright Vaskya liked it rough. They knew it wasn’t possible, but they always tried to jump into the sky. The airtime they got made them just want to keep on flying. They watched The Stacks grow out of the beneath them. I wish other shit could grow outta sand like that. Better than cactus at least. The Stacks were just a bunch of servers cobbled together for a few stories, covered by linen and plastic to try and keep out some of the airborne sand. There was too much technology for a proper apocalypse, so people just sorta clumped together around servers and whatever power sources are left. Wanted to live somewhere warmer? Go deeper into The Stacks. Want somewhere colder? Move closer to the outside world. Don’t want Wi-Fi? Die. Well, I mean there’s life without Wi-Fi and shit but honestly what’s the motherfuckin point. I’d rather take a header off a fuckin ledge than go back to board games, books, and talking face to face with other pieces of shit. Its all code and graphics for me. But not binary. Fuck binary.  
Vaskya kept thinking as they kept accelerating towards The Stacks. Mmmmmm I’ll write about me first kill. Make it instructional. Show don’t tell. Love not War. Those fucking dumbasses. Now dead dumbasses.  
Vaskya looked behind them and saw the sand veil contrail their boogie board was leaving and, caught up in how cool they knew they were looking, hit a rock and tumbled head over heels for several yards. Much like their memory of their first kill there was…

* * *

_Dirt, flailing and screaming. Others? No one around. Dead air. Killed. Trying to struggle. Skin burning. Bacon. No mask, no poncho. No ozone. Hot inside poncho. Safe inside. Still struggling. Pink skin. Each execution comes through three simple steps, locate, immobilize, carry out. Training._   
_Located._   
_Expensive compound. Mile square. Four guards outside. One looking into the sun. Blind spot, dead. Second no flank watch, dead. Heard bodies drop. Hide under bodies. Distracted. Shot longer than point blank. Point blank is the only zone you should shoot from because statistically there is no significant chance of missing. Missed. Knew better. Charge. Guard fumbled the safety. Dead. Coming around corner headfirst, two shots, dead. Idiot. Conserve bullets. Knew better._   
_Metal door. Wood hinges. Defenses weak. Defender of marriage. Metal legislature, wooden logic. Radios? No noise. Guards inside? Dogs? No noise. Booby trap? 50/50 I die as I open this door. Never deal in chances, chances are for gamblers and you are nowhere fuckin near Vegas. Locked door? No resistance on the handle. Push dead sack of shit through the door. Falls forward, mechanical “Crunth”. Tripwire. Sledge from above. Second death. Second life. Dogs should be able to vote. Focus. Blood on clothes. Again. Shuffling. Coming to check who died._   
_“Олег! почему!? Что ты делал?!?”_   
_Russian retching. Fear_   
_“Алло? Ваня, Саша? Куда Пришёл?”_   
_Enemy shotgun pump. If this were a game I could tell the gun from the reload sound._   
_“Uh—Где твая мама Саша?”_   
_Code. Don’t answer. Hold the angle. Curiosity killed the cat. Curiosity is going to kill again. Head pokes around corner. Dead. Clean the door corners. Didn’t call for others. Titty trap is gone. Wide angles. No dogs. No cover. Pool. Water. Two hedges on either side. Large cover over pool against sun. Funny. Ironic. More like no-zone. Bridge over pool to front door. Large stucco house. Door open. Full audience. Four hookers, one woman, two cooks, a wife, and shitler himself. Slack jaws. Look down at my work. Uh-Oh baby pose. Finger on gasmask where lips would be. Cocked head in questioning. Hips trust out to the side, Other hand pointed down away. Kawaii. They don’t get the joke. Running. He slips and falls. Dropped poncho. Skin will suffer. Rest of the group gone. Ran. Fair weather. Cute punches. Never deployed. Chair force. Grab from behind. And push into the sun._   
_Immobilized._   
_Grab ass. Grab them right by the--testicles pop. Tide pods. Screaming. Virtuous Christian. Probably going to hell for touching his balls without getting hitched first. Probably the first one who wasn’t his pastor or himself to touch them. Alright. Cheap shot. #NotEveryPastor. #JustTooMany. Choke hold. Where’s weak? Toes manicured. This little piggy baked to black in the sun. Knees quivering from underuse. Too pale. Stomach bulging. Overstuffed. My stomach bulging. Haven’t eaten for days. Neck lumpy. Soft. Weak chin. Weak knees. Break like carrots. Haven’t had a carrot in years. Frozen never fresh. Gordon Ramsey turns in his grave._   
_Carry out._   
_Golf. Fore. It’s a bridge breaker. Nose bleeds are most efficiently stopped with tampons which is why, among others, you all should carry them in the field. Lazy rivers racing into gaping gullet. Overflowing mouth. Too much blood. Platelets panicking. Doing their job. Just following orders. Heh. Work makes free. Release this one from life. Heard your parents died early. Brutal. I always like making fun of orphans because what are they going to do, tell their parents? Laughing. Choking. Good little platelets clogging. Snorting. Hold head back. Drowning._   
_Done._


	2. Genesis Pt. 2

Vaskya held their head, waiting for their inner ear to re-adjust itself. Their boogie board hadn’t noticed their absence and kept going until it was out of sight. Half buried in the sand and very happy there weren’t enough people around to be embarrassed for—Then again…Vaska eyed some lizards suspiciously. It sounded like snickering when they walked their little feets across the sand. One particular fella was the tan of san—sand color. H-he was the not yellow but sorta brown of what sand looks like, like if you’ve been to the beach and there is that stuff you walk on it’s the.

The lizard was mostly that color, with a terracotta turquoise spiral in the middle of his noggin, and trancing down his spine. He ran right up to Vaskya, “What in hell and tarnation are you doin here in my land?! By gumbit I bought and paid for this land with a good few fly and cap of water for this section and you’ve gone and messed it up!”

Vaska pushed their knuckle into the side of their nose bridge, but then flinched as shooting pain went through their head. I must’ve broken my nose. squinting with one eye while opening the other, they tried to see if the little guy’s lips were moving or not.

“If you know whats good for you, you better GIT”

The lizard took a predatory step forward.

“I said GIT”

Another granule of sand flew as he stomped his tiny toes.

“A-are you a? A talking lizard?”

“Darn tootin, who’s askin?”

Vaskya didn’t reply but grabbed a jar from their backpack and slammed it down over top of the tiny guy.

“RMRFGMTR”

“MURGURGUS”

He has enough air right? Oh sure. Mmm. Yeah.

“RTUGFRARF”

Mmmmmmmmmaybe.

The little bastard jumped towards Vaska and hit the glass wall, propelling the mason jar into Vaskya’s freshly broken nose.

FAACK. Ass titting fuck shitting. Vaska went to touch their nose and then jumped back again forgetting their injury. The jar was in their lap, tinking softly with the rage of the pent-up lizard. Vaskya got up slowly and put the jar in their bag. 

They stood up and looked for their boogie board, to no avail. They padded down their cargo-shorts while mocking in a high-pitched voice, “Vaskya when are you ever going to use those cargo shorts? Cargo shorts? For what cargo?

Fuck all y’all, THIS cargo.”

They took out a small remote and hit a comically large green button. There was a buzzing noise, and the boogie board came sailing back up the side of the mountain, stopping just at their feet. After jumping on their boogie board and making a much meeker ride down the rest of the incline, Vaska slinked into The Stacks. After about ten steps Their phone connected to the charging pad, (The Stacks put charging pads on the ground under glass to make the whole (City? Settlement? Shebang?) a charging zone.) Ok, now quick while I have the authorial spirit within me. Rolling through m’body… it has been a minute since my body was rolling from—Focus Vaska. Write.

* * *

you have opened this book and now have a choice. 19Join me in the crusade that God Herself has ordained me to do, and I assume you too given her will is always enacted even through different tools, or don’t. 20Please however, don’t be deluded. 21It is both God’s will, and Her wrath enacting the judgement on these souls. 22They’ve made a false god up for their purposes, for their needs and for their class. 23But God was born into sandals not a fucking pair of baby seal skin boots.


	3. 3.

Vaska decided to set up camp a couple stories in a stack a few towers deep. There weren’t any landlords—once the police had stopped pretending to care about the old laws and gone away—we’d given them a short hop with a tight knot. No, you just had to plug in and check who’s display or panel you’re fucking with to makes sure if you mess something up, you can take them and their goons. One time I knew a kid who pulled out a panel on the top of a stack. He, “Just wanted to see how the air was up there.” Well. He didn’t take the panels out carefully, he just pulled and ripped chords until he could shove the boards out. Turns out he’d fucked up a bitcoin hardware wallet for some smalltime mercenary group. They plugged a few quarter-inch cables into his neck jacks and blasted static through his brain until it boiled.

Fun stuff.

So anyways.

Vaska looked around the street. All of the ground-level spots were already taken up by merchants and programmers. The removed sections were made into ramps or staircases, roofs and caves, still connected to each other with thick chords bound into bundles used like ropes and firemen’s poles. There were places for Jews, “you”s, and Tank Girl’s crew, you name it The Stacks has room for it. Vaska picked out a small place above their favorite Chinese food chain, “The Great Mexico Wall”. They took bitcoin and had kiosks all over! All you gotta do is throw some bitcoin at it and your food will be flown fresh from (supposedly) China within ten minutes or your money back. Great stuff. I pulled up my web wallet and held my finger over the pin, waiting for the familiar prick to give the drone my sequence to follow. 

“Hey! Vaskya!” Lanis waved at them.

“Sup Lanis”

Lanis was a roaming modder who Vaskya’d ran into too many times for it to be a coincidence. Vaskya knew there had to be some ulterior motives, “Still following me Lanis?”

“Funny, I was about to ask the same question.”

There was a healthy silence before they both nodded at each other and went on their separate ways.

“Hey, wait! I almost forgot,” Lanis turned around and half jogged over to Vaska, “Didn’t you say you wanted a third jack? I should have the parts to do it in a couple days.”

Vaskya put their hand on their neck and felt their two quarter-sized holes. The jacks allowed anyone to had them to plug into stacks, and by association the internet, and surf it mentally. You can have displays installed in contacts, I do, or you can try just purely surfing mentally. But I don’t know anyone who does that if they can have the contacts. The reason you’d get more jacks is because you can’t always update the software of the last plug. So the first plug I got was for in-head music, vision and memory replay, and a really basic timer. The second allows me to get online and the third is for topical epidermal modifications. Moving and smart tattoos, etc.

“Nah, I don’t even know where I’d put a third one.”

“most people just shove it under the other two. Haven’t you heard though? They made a plugin to download facial features and race.”

“Soundsssssssss,” Vaska held out the s until they could think of a word that was sufficient, “innovative”

“Hey man, I’m not a philosopher I just install mods.”

His hands were always the attractive amount of dirty. Where it’s noticeable, but not unsanitary. And they had that nice rough feel, of work, from labor, from instruments. Vaskya shook their head, “Catch you later Lanis,” and walked away. 


	4. Next Chapter.

Vaskya scampered up above the restaurant (After ordering the Mongolian beef over fried egg noodles of course) and attached a carabiner to the front of the panel they wanted to take out. Like rock climbing, but server stacks. Vaska took out a connection chord (It had a malleable plug so it could adapt to USB, quarter inch, anything with a plug I can get into) and plugged in.

Trying to describe what it’s like to plug in, would be like trying to describe the internet to a medieval king. So wipe the gruel off your chin and try your best not to ask stupid questions.

I didn’t make it so I have no fuckin clue how it works. I know how computers work but have no fuckin’ CLUE how biology let alone brain-al biology works, and I don’t think you know too much about either, sooooooooo.

I know each user is registered as a separate computer, a different client machine if that doesn’t confuse you. The plug takes over the nervous system around the brainstem and takes your inputs as commands. You know how coders have to type in order to code? Well now it’s just thoughts. But, you have to do something in order to get the line of code you just thought up to execute. Like snap, or blink or some physical act. Before we had _that_ people would be plugged in, someone would talk about deleting this file or some other shit and they’d do it on accident. It was all too fast to be able to control. One chick I heard died after someone told her to delete her internal folder named system 32 as a joke. Now, that wouldn’t mean anything to a brain-ologist, but if you delete a computer’s system 32 folder then the whole thing is fucked. So, I assume it took whatever the human equivalent of a system 32 folder is and deleted it. Which resulted her immediate (hopefully painless) death. Ah but we have these mistakes. I mean what is humanity without making mistakes, huh?

But anyways, visually you don’t see anything unless you have the contacts (ya’ know, like I said before?) and even then it doesn’t look like anything besides a bunch of boxes and lines of info. Without the contacts you just have to assume you’re not making any mistakes, and you have to assume you’re looking in the right places etc. You can have information read to you internally (connected to your inner ear or something) to confirm you’re in the right places, but I would rather just get a couple contacts. The one up-side of contact-less is that you can use your eyes for other shit besides coding. But fuck that. Just like my uncle always said, “don’t half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.”

Vaska, attached to the stack and plugged in, started to surf the contents. Prawn. Porn? No, Prawn, and holy shit that’s a lotta them. Where the fuck did you get so many prawns?? It doesn’t matter. Vaskya unplugged. It was a photo repository for some prawn-dealer who didn’t understand what a cloud was, because many of these were deleted of his local phone but not off the cloud. But yeah I can take him, and he looks like he’s no where near me if his geotags are right…

Vaska unplugged and went to the edge of the layer, they didn’t need anything too luxurious or anything, one panel should do. After securing the handles to the panel above the one they were taking out, they activated a small robot from their pocket, which operated like a winch, and slowly tugged the board out of place. Once it fell out it swung in the air lightly, chords making the same nose as trees in the wind, before coming to a mostly complete stop, and falling silent. Vaskya clambered up before hearing a buzzing of a delivery drone. They looked up hopefully and held out their hands towards it, I can already taste that spicy beef, and those goddamn noodles which make me wanna full-body CUM come on baby just land right here in my, but it droned slowly by. Fuck. I’ve been teased for days on end, which makes me feel less let down than that.

Vaskya rolled out their sleeping roll and clicked open a sticky light. They threw it against the ceiling and it illuminated the 12x14x6 space with the comfortable, warm light of about 2500 on the color temperature scale. They took out what looked like a piece of chewing gum, and gnawed on it for a second before spitting it out and mashing it against the side of the opening. Then Vaska plugged into it, coded for a second, then unplugged. They waved their hand in front of it, and instantaneously heard a beeping in their ear. A foot behind the detector they hung a light curtain, a bright red then blue, then red stripe, with several shapes in gold on the first stripe. Finally, they took a small hexagon from their backpack on the floor and tossed it a few feet away. It folded out, and then half of it shot up, repelled by the magnates below. It was a perfect electronic four tom drum set, with two cymbals and a cushy throne. Two drum sticks slid out of the snare head, ready to go. Vaska sat down, when the alarm sounded. Their food was here!


End file.
